ABSTRACT
By the seventeenth century, the people of China and England shared several important social practices, including print culture, a centralizing state, and a tradition of protest literature. Despite this, eighteenth-century radicals tended to stress the differences between the Chinese and English political systems. The reason is that English intellectuals realized the utility of a meritocratic model for reforming the British aristocracy and so stressed what was novel about the Chinese system. One of the most novel ideas for that time was the Mencian notion that the purpose of government was to promote the people’s happiness. This theme appears repeatedly in seventeenth-century texts based on Chinese documents. By the 1730s it was being recommended to Frederick, Prince of Wales. The theme appears in the writings of the Free Thinkers and goes mainstream in the works of Raynal, Rousseau, Paine, and Jefferson. The rest of the chapter focuses on evolving representations of the multitude in England from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. In early prints the poor were portrayed as an “enthusiast rabble,” and Hogarth renders the electorate as an uncouth mob, but in later prints he portrays poverty-stricken women as victims of corrupt administration. These women stand as metonymy for the mass of poor people in a manner not unlike that of malnourished farmers in Song painting. By the late eighteenth-century the character of John Bull comes to represent the English workingman by synecdoche. Such prints take for granted an educated audience capable of responding with sympathy for the exploited poor.
